Don’t Trust a Pillow: On the Use of Chinese Characters in the US

People in Western Countries Love Chinese Characters

Walk into any home décor store and you are sure to find a throw pillow or some wall art with Chinese characters on it. Usually there is an English translation somewhere too. While it is nice that people are interested in Chinese culture, this is not really how written Chinese works. It is very common to see a character like 爱 on its own and then the translation “love” written in smaller font.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

… But They Usually Don’t Understand How They Work

This is misleading to anyone who does not speak or read Chinese because Chinese words are usually the combination of two characters. So while 爱 does in fact mean love, we have many words that are love-related that use the character 爱. For example, the word for romantic love is 爱情. The word for patriotism is 爱国. Just translating 爱 as love on a piece of wall art misses a great deal of the richness of Mandarin Chinese.

There are also cases in which the translations written on a candle holder is wrong or misleading. It took me .000235 seconds of Googling (okay, maybe a little bit longer) to find the below image. It is a pillow with the character 牙 on it and the English translation is “fang.” The word for fang in Chinese is actually 獠牙 (like a monster’s fang). On its own, 牙 can mean tooth, a tooth-like thing, or even ivory. Without the addition of the character 獠 in order to clarify the meaning, 牙 does not translate to “fang” at all.

Yet another example of Chinese characters with a misleading translation

Don’t Trust a Pillow to Tell You What a Character Means

It is great that people appreciate the beauty of Chinese characters. I would not, however, trust anything that you can buy at Target. Just like any other language, Mandarin Chinese is complex. A piece of wall art with the character 静 on it and the word “tranquility” below does not give the full picture of how the character is used in context. It may look cool, but there is a lot more to it.

For a laugh, the blog Hanzi Smatter is devoted to “the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture.” There are lots of embarrassing tattoos! (Some content is adults-only).